We are so close to being done with Kenwood! SO CLOSE….and yet, so far.

Last Wednesday, we had a house full of polish men tiling the bathrooms and were awaiting our beautiful hardwood flooring to be delivered. The windows have been installed and siding is being ordered. I swear as I left the house, birds were chirping. I’m just about to pour myself a dirty martini when I check my phone to find 4 missed calls and 4 voicemails – there’s no gas in the house.

*pause*

Excuse me *mild laugh*, what?

No gas.

No gas = no heat.

Of course there’s no heat in the house anymore! The flooring was just delivered and needs to be acclimated, we have marble tile on the walls that needs to dry, and we have shiny copper pipes that have water in them! When else could this possibly happen?! It’s okay, if I can handle dumpster delivery, I can handle gas delivery. So, I call the gas company and speak to a woman who seems angry that I was born and tells me, basically, that nothing can be resolved until the morning. I glance over to watch Tom Skilling announcing record low temperatures and an incoming blizzard overnight.

You know what, I’ll take that martini dry.

Thursday morning, I call the gas company who still seems unimpressed with my potential thousands in losses here. I then proceed to drive downtown to the gas company in a blizzard to speak to someone in person.

Upon arriving at the building, the front desk tells me that “the office is not for customer service” (ironic, I know) . So, I went back to my car parked in front of the building and called them. On the bright side, the woman I spoke with was extremely nice while pointing out my insignificance in the world.

It’s now been 7 days since we’ve had heat in the house. We’ve drained the pipes and poor Sebastien is working with the kerosene generator he hates so much while laying freezing stone with his bare hands.

Sebastien has primarily been focusing on the master bathroom. We have marble everything in the master bath. Marble is beautiful – it’s tricky though. Let’s not forget that marble is, in fact, stone so it has character that you have to work around. This character includes personality traits like non-conforming edges:

See the problem?

You may not notice a bigger gap between the shapes on one sheet, you will notice it across 25 sheets on the floor. So, Sebastien has to cut the netting individually to make it more uniform – or make sure those sheets are under the cabinets.

Another character trait: waves. Waves are gorgeous on a giant slab that’s going, say, on a counter. When it’s cut into subway tile pieces for a shower, we have to be careful. Sebastien hand picks each tile and matches them like a puzzle so that we still have continuous waves going up the walls:

Finally, just to keep it interesting, we have a bench seat in the steam shower. This is very functional for the avid spa-goer; however, it adds dimension to the look of the shower. This means that when you look at the wall of the shower from the closest wall across to the wall behind the bench seat (which is further back), your eye should not move. Your eye should not want to look up and down as you scan. Visually, the point of reference should be identical. This is achieved by making sure your plumb line goes straight across the entire shower:

Notice how the laser hits the same row of tiles all the way across? This is what separates the goods from the greats – and Sebastien is great.

So, all in all, we’re still freezing. At least we have something pretty to look at while digging into our pockets.